We seem to be heading down a vanishing trail at Livejournal. Several rumours have surfaced. Nothing has been verified by anyone, but there is at least a chance Livejournal will be one of the first of the diary/social networking sites to disappear. That would devastate me personally.
In my livejournal I have the opportunity to consolidate everything into my friendspage. This means I can put more than 150 people who update their diaries at whatever interval onto a single page. I get their new entries whenever they make them and don't have to go look at their journals or rely on email to notify me that they have made a new entry.
To this you can add over 70 "communities" that I follow, places as diverse as 
cooking, ssdi and banzaiinstitute. Some update many times a day, I get easily 20 recipes every day, and others maybe once a month, even less.
On top of that, I follow 50 RSS feeds all of which automatically appear on my page with their latest updates. I don't have to go out and check them or go through a list.
Using my friendspage I can do something I've never seen anywhere else and which is uniquely useful to me because of my vision and limited computer skills (of late). Livejournal's friendspage puts literally hundreds of entries a day on a single page through which I can scroll throughout the day getting all my news, updates on friends, and tidbits to feed my interests.
If I had to look at all those journal entries manually, find all the communities, work through all those RSS feeds, I would never see any appreciable part of that information in the course of a day.
In short I'd hate to lose Livejournal. I actually have a "permanent" account here. I have set up a bail-out spot at http://louderblog.wordpress.com. I am also setting up at Insane Journal as louderback. Insane is a Livejournal clone but a somewhat lesser child of it's greater sire.
